The blackened river ran through the park.
Past there, the numb gardens
were hemmed by thick braids of hedges.

“The summer has gone by both quickly and slowly.
It’s been a kind of eternity, each day spinning
out its endlessness, and yet with every look

I will not grace you with a name...Even “you”, however modest the convention: not here.
No need here for that much presence. Let “you” be “she”, and let the choice, incidentally,
be dictated not by bitterness or fear—a discretion, simply, the most inoffensive decorum.

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar, complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are budded—I hadn’t even noticed—